Daily Archives: June 30, 2010

When it comes to unified communications and collaboration (UCC), HP isn’t ready to bet the house on a single partner. It has struck UC-related partnerships with Microsoft, Avaya, and Alcatel-Lucent, and it also has the capability, through products obtained as a result of its 3Com acquisition, to develop a home-grown alternative.

It isn’t surprising that HP’s channel partners and customers, as well as neutral observers, are confused by HP’s seemingly promiscuous approach to UCC solutions. I’ll try to shed a bit of light on the situation, but I suspect nothing is carved in stone and that HP’s strategy will be subject to change.

Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent struck their deals with HP’s services business, which will act as a system integrator in bundling and delivering solutions to customers. It’s worth noting that HP also has a video-collaboration and UC partnership with Polycom.

HP has decided to play the field for a couple reasons. First, the UCC space remains an underdeveloped market whose best days remain ahead of it. Despite years of hype, unified communicaitons has yet to fulfill its potential. To be fair, the reasons for that underachievement have more to do with industry politics and macroeconomic circumstances than with technological factors. Nonetheless, the market is one that has seemed perpetually on the cusp of better times.

Another reason that HP has cast a wide net with its UCC partnering efforts is that the predilections of the market, both with regard to vendors and architectural approaches, have yet to be revealed. Neither the PBX approach from Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent nor the desktop gambit from Microsoft has been declared a definitive winner. Moreover, the possibility exists that hosted UCC solutions might prove attractive to a significant number of enterprise customers. HP is getting into the game, but it’s spreading its bets across a number of leading contenders until the odds shift and one vendor establishes a clear market advantage.

As for why HP is getting into the game, well, the answer is partly that the company detects improving fortunes for UCC and partly that it feels compelled to respond to Cisco. One thing that HP and all its UCC partners have in common is competition against Cisco. HP needs an enterprise alternative to what Cisco is offering, and these partnerships provide it with various options.

Even though HP focused on the SME space with its latest Microsoft UCC announcement, I can’t see clear horizontal- or vertical-market delineation in HP’s partnering strategy.

Consequently, HP’s technology partners can’t feel overly secure. Any of these deals could fall apart, in real (revenue-generating) terms, without much warning. HP will follow its customers’ money. At the same time, it might be tempted to build or buy its own alternative. Further chapters in this story are sure to written.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it, but I’ll offer a relatively brief assessment of Cisco’s Cius enterprise-tablet announcement yesterday.

Look, folks, the Cius is not competing with the iPad for the affections and disposable income of tablet-buying consumers. That’s not Cisco’s game, is not part of Cisco’s plans, and is just not happening. So, as difficult as it might be to do, forget about Apple and the iPad for now. Put it out of your minds. Apple gets more than its share of attention already, and I’m sure we’ll have many other reasons to pay homage to the iPad, the iPhone, and the other iWonders best0wed upon us by the wizards of Cupertino.

Now that we’ve determined what the Cius (as in “see us,” get it?) is not, what exactly is it? For starters, it’s clearly an extension of Cisco’s enterprise videoconferencing and video-collaboration portfolio. Cisco has been working from the high end to the low end, starting with luxury, room-based telepresence, buying its way into a wider range of corporate telepresence and videoconferencing through its Tandberg acquisition, and now developing its own low-end tablet, the Cius, to make enterprise video mobile and to deliver it to desktop docking stations.

So, one way of understanding the Cius is as a means for Cisco to extend telepresence, videoconferencing, and video collaboration to areas of the enterprise it has yet to penetrate. It’s Cisco’s way of making sure video proliferates throughout its customer base, giving Cisco opportunities to derive sales not only from video-based products, but also from the enterprise-network upgrades that inevitably result from widespread utilization of high-bandwidth video on a corporate campus. For Cisco, there’s a revenue multiplier effect that is concomitant with the spread of enterprise video.

Not coincidentally, this move also precludes potential competitive encroachments by competing vendors of low-end videoconferencing and video-collaboration products. Cisco had a hole at the low end of its video product portfolio, and it has closed it with this announcement.

With the Cius, Cisco also integrates its enterprise-wide video-collaboration tributaries with its preexisting IP phone, unified communications (UC), and data-collaboration (as in WebEx) product streams. The docking station that comes with the Cius isn’t just an ornamental device holder; it is intended to act as the physical point of integration between personal video-collaboration and Cisco IP phones. Competitors cut off at the pass here include Microsoft, HP, Avaya, and scores of others.

Finally — and Cisco’s reach might exceed its grasp on this one — the networking giant would like enterprises to view the Cius as an office-computer replacement. In defense of that argument, Cisco cites the Cius’ notebook-caliber Atom chip, its capacity to accommodate a monitor and keyboard, and its support for virtualization. I think Cisco has to put more meat on these skeletal bones, but I can see where they’d like to go and why. Again, Microsoft is a big target. It will be interesting to see how closely Cisco and Google, whose Android OS runs the Cius, can work together to disrupt their common foe.

All in all, the Cius was a logical move for Cisco, a practical and broad-based extension of its video-collaboration strategy. Apple, though, isn’t in this particular picture.